4 thoughts on “Open Access”

Thanks for speaking out on this very important issue, Steve. I have often discovered academic books that I wanted to purchase, only to be blocked by prohibitive costs of $100 or more for a single book (of average length). This type of de facto “hoarding” of knowledge should be deeply disturbing to all academics and intellectuals.

I;ve been very active on AAAARG.ORG for about a year now. AAAARG was temporarily taken down by MacMillan, simply because their DMCA request was freakin’ huge.

In response, AAAARG now requests that people upload files to 3rd party sites (like mediafire, uploading, ifile, etc.) and enter the url to that file in a specific field.

This way, the focus is deflected from AAAARG, and onto the file hosting service. These services will, of course, take down files that get DMCA requests, but once the file is broken, it is trivial for someone to post on AAAARG that the link is dead, please re-post it. Eventually someone with the file will repost it. The AAAARG community is an active and good bunch.

AVAXHOME.WS is another service for finding books. Not as nice and organised as AAAARG, but it does work, and I have found many things of value on there. The search is at avaxsearch.com .

Prior to MacMillan napalming AAAARG, Verso also waltzed in and started barking DMCA take down notices. The irony of a DMCA takedown notice over a book by Zizek or Althusser seems to have been sadly lost on the dreary little minds of the folks at Verso. So, in response, people have set up blogs allowing people to collect the works in question…

It’s a struggle, and as part of the information class struggle, I don’t see it as something that will be fixed soon or easily.